Steve Strogatz on Networks and the Phillips Machine

I had never heard of the Phillips Machine, but there is a refurbished one at Cambridge that "works". As Steve Strogatz explains in his latest guest column in the New York Times, it's basically a miniature hydraulic caricature of the economy. The article then relates this briefly to some modern work in networks and complex systems, more generally bringing up the point that one of the really exciting and challenging things of these subjects is the attempt to move beyond reductionism.